The Principal Investigator and three co-investigators are all members of the Department of Demography at the University of California at Berkeley. They seek to increase the number of leading scientists in the demography of aging by hiring and mentoring researchers at early or middle formative stages in their careers. It is likely that one of the candidates will be an early post-doctoral scholar and that the other will be from among late junior faculty candidates; the Program as formulated here broadly proposes to mentor one of each. The proposal relies on four of Berkeley's major strengths in the field of population aging: 1. The four investigators have substantial experience in teaching, research, mentoring, and public service. The four investigators from that department have received substantial recognition, much of it for work in the demography of aging, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences (3), fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2), the current winner of the Irene Taeuber Award from the Population Association of America, the Mindel Sheps Award (2), past chairs of the National Research Council Committee on Population (2) and membership on the current Council of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (1). 2. An interdisciplinary group of social science researchers with active research interests in the broad field of population aging. An NIA-funded Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (CEDA) serves as the focal point for its member researchers, who come from such fields as business administration, demography, entomology, health economics, law, and public policy. 3. A wider group of researchers on aging in the biological sciences and in the professional schools of public health and social welfare, clustered around the Academic Geriatric Center on Aging. The in-coming Director of this Center is also Vice-Chair of CEDA and recipient of an NIA K-07 Academic Career Leadership Award to coordinate all aging-related activities in the Berkeley region. 4. The opportunity to work under mentors whose current research interests lie in one of four fields: biodemography of aging; analysis of intergenerational transfers; cross-national research on mortality at extreme ages; developing perspectives on aging grounded in evolutionary anthropology.